Heretofore, collators have been operated in such a fashion that detection of a missed sheet, or a doubly fed sheet, would require stoppage of the machine.
Naturally, when a machine is stopped due to a malfunction, a great deal of time is spent in resetting and rerunning the apparatus. Also, if a machine will automatically cease to function, an attendant must always be ready to service the apparatus in anticipation of a shut-down.
A better way to operate the collator is to have a continuous run until the end of the cycle. The problem with this type of operation, however, is that it requires some means of separating an improperly collated set from the majority of properly collated sets.
The present invention has provided a means of allowing a collator to have a continuous collator run despite feeding mistakes, by off-setting improperly collated stacks of sheet material to a third (improper) stack position.